Review/Film Festival; Romantic Summer Break At a Japanese Boys' School

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: March 24, 1989

It comes as no surprise to learn that all of the earlier films by Shusuke Kaneko, the young Japanese director of ''Summer Vacation: 1999,'' have been soft-core porn. Only a man utterly exhausted by the second-rate pleasures of grunting-and-groaning simulated sex could make a film as chastely, madly romantic as ''Summer Vacation: 1999.''

The film, one of the oddest and most original entries in the current New Directors/New Films series, will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art today at 6 P.M. and on Sunday at 3:30.

Not for nothing is ''Summer Vacation: 1999'' set in what looks to be a remote present, in the beautiful landscapes of birch forests and mountain pools that surround a boys' boarding school. In this idealization of a known physical world, four students go about their daily routines during the summer break. They cook their own meals, study, play chamber music and, far more important, suffer the first torments of pubescent love.

The boys are apparently unsupervised by even a lazy janitor, though it may be that they are so self-absorbed that they don't see anyone else. They exist outside of time. They are unconnected to any easily identifiable era, as is the school itself, a great masonry pile that looks like Japan's Diet building placed atop the Federal Court House at Foley Square.

In the precredit sequence, a boy named Yu writes a farewell letter, slips it under the door of another student, and walks out into the night (moonlit, of course) to a promontory high above a small lake. Throwing up his arms as if to execute a back flip, Yu jumps off to (one must assume) his death, though his body is never found. It turns out that Yu has been unable to go on living, his love having been rebuffed by Kazuhiko, a slightly older boy.

At the film's more formal start, Kazuhiko, Naoto, the oldest boy, and Norio, the youngest, are continuing as before when a new student, Kaoru, arrives. To the uneasy astonishment of the others, Kaoru looks exactly like the dead Yu, except that he is outgoing and self-assured. Kaoru says that any resemblance to anyone living or dead must be a coincidence, and he's ready to fight anyone who contradicts him.

Romantic passions are reawakened. Old alliances are reformed. It seems that Naoto and Norio also love Kazuhiko, who uses his friends but can't return their love. But having been tormented by nightmares since Yu's death, he finds himself drawn to the new boy, who is not especially impressed. There is eventually another suicide or, maybe, a murder.

Though ''Summer Vacation: 1999'' is detached from any reality, it could not be more Japanese. It sees youth as a time of perfect innocence, so beautiful, so androgynous and so transitory that death is its only protector. That these shifting games of love seem important, at least while one is watching the film, is partly because the movie never becomes literal. Everything in it is a discreet representation.

This includes the cast. The four boys are played by four girls who, aged 14 to 16, are able to mime the androgynous aspects of a boyhood that will never be coarsened by time. They don't look especially like boys. They are idealizations, much as the women played by men in the Noh and Kabuki theaters are not particular women but the essence of women as seen by men.

The young actresses make no attempt to imitate boys in gestures or mannerisms. They don't visibly act, nor are they automatons. With what appears to be enormous tact and seriousness, they stand in for the boy-figures, which, aside from what is said about them, remain distinct but uncharacterized.

''Summer Vacation: 1999'' is not an unalloyed delight. After a while it becomes both too precious and too tricky for its own good, as if Mr. Kaneko hadn't a clue about how to end it. If one makes the mistake of trying to identify with it, the film quickly becomes twaddle. It's so solemn that a giggle from just one person in the audience will send the the whole thing flying out the window.

Mr. Kaneko's accomplishment is the creation of a stylized narrative without resorting to the usual tricks of avant-garde cinema. No fancy cutting or camera work. No jarring juxtapositions of time and place. Instead of jazzing up the real world with special effects, he pares it down to essentials. In much the same way, his boy-figures are so intent on their romantic attachments that sex - as simulated in Mr. Kaneko's soft-core porn films - is unthinkable. IDEALIZED ANDROGYNY - SUMMER VACATION: 1999, directed by Shusuke Kaneko; screenplay (Japanese with English subtitles) by Michiyo Kishida; photography by Takama Kenji; music by Yuriko Nakamura; art director, Osamu Yamaguchi; a New Yorker Films Release. At the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, as part of the New Directors/New Films Series. Running time: 90 minutes. This film has no rating. Kaoru/Yu...Eri Miyagima Naoto...Miyuki Nakano Kazuhiko...Tomoko Otakra Norio...Rie Mizuhara